Could a few of us get some help with an overwhelmingly big idea? We call it the Co-opernation. We could also use help naming things.

My beloved and I would often get frustrated watching TED talks, seeing all these lovely, brilliant ideas that we were afraid would never happen in the real world, even though they made more sense than what we saw around us.

When she passed away, a few of us started working on an idea she inspired.

The idea was to stop fighting AGAINST anything and to simply use every single tool at our disposal to make a better place for the people we loved. We looked in a lot of right places and even more wrong ones, focused on seeing tools as what they were rather than what they were used for, and a strange question presented itself.

Would it be possible to take the framework of a corporation, like a Valve or Mondragon, insert a whole bunch of other people's amazing ideas and basically, turn corporate campuses into charter cities? Could we free people to simply help other people and remove most of the worries society has created? If we do this right could we hire anybody who wants to be a good person and contribute to the greater good and instantly free them from the current messes we're in?

So, we found our 'yes' answer pretty early (mostly standing on the shoulders of giants who hate each other), but it was a scary revolutionary confrontational thing and somehow that just felt WRONG. So we dedicated ourselves to making it gentle, harmless, hilarious, and non-threatening, and we're pretty much there.

And now we need help! We're shy, but since TED really is the biggest source we have, we want to start here. Our hope is to get some help organizing us, getting this idea out there and into some better hands so it can grow and get even better, then we can hopefully crowdsource a mellow revolution.

I've been thinking along these ways for quite some time now and I'm glad to see that I'm not alone with this idea.
But instead of a "Co-opernation" it's always been "The self replicating village" in my head.

I'm not sure how much of a help this is for you but I think you could use some of the tools and methods that I've found in my search to help realize this.

So it probably goes without saying that money is (sadly) needed for this and crowdfunding is a possible and great way to go (I think it has to crowdfunded to succeed). However the usual sites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo are ill equipped for this kind of thing since they mostly focus on "creative projects". So here are 10 sites that might be better suited for that goal. http://plantostart.com/10-crowdfunding-websites-entrepreneurs/

Now to the profits, it has to be; Green, good and profitable. I'm not sure if you've heard of Gunther Pauli, but he's had at least three TEDxTalks and his company "The Blue Economy" has open solutions for making money while being green and doing good to the world. I'll list one of his Talks and the website.
Talk: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MyTHmTDT2Qw
Website: http://www.blueeconomy.eu/

Since information is key you'll need a website to present all the aspects of the projects and it has to be well designed and appealing. For this TopCoder is the best option that I've found. There are nearly half a million registered users that know how to design and code just about anything that can be written with 1's and 0's and it's modeled much like OpenArchitectureNetwork. There's no Talk, only a website to this one I'm afraid. http://www.topcoder.com

May 30 2013:
I've got to add, the geek in me is in love with TopCoder! :)

Many thanks! And yes, we're heading the same place, just for slightly different reasons!

We all want to head in generally the same place, I think. We just need to band together en-masse instead of having all these tiny little projects and dreams that never really get to play in the sea of ideas.

May 30 2013:
Thanks Jimmy for your recent input, I think you have provided some good links (albeit I haven't checked them out yet), though anticipate you have put in the groundwork, time and research.
William, thankyou for your frankness and utopian ideal. I appreciate the fact that you have a life outside your TED posts here and that you would need time to contemplate all that has been posted here and so then, develop your idea further.
Fritzie, thankyou for your moderating inputs which are always, thoughtful, diplomatic, sincere and well thought thru.
Jacqueline thankyou for posting your comment about what essentially was my collective summation and endorsement of it, namely my Q & A post. I must say, I agreed with everything you said and was honestly surprised that more was not done with it or talked further about on this forum about it.
To me, life is not so much about the destination, but the journey to get there.
Also, what to some people is just lemons, to others it's lemonade, they make something of it. Or one mans junk is another mans treasure. Which in turn means that, I have learnt and grown as a person from participating here.
For example, I have gained knowledge about things I did not know before. I have been able to see things from others points of view. I have interacted with other people from all parts of the world in (for the most part) an intellectual and interesting way.
I have got to know others by way of their posts and in a loose way now see them as people I sort of know.In this respect when we come across each other as is bound to happen in other posts on TED we will forge a familiarity and plenty of other positives.
So Blade Runner, I don't agree with your postulation that I would concede this was just a waste of time, for all the reasons I have just given above. A big idea takes time to come to fruition, so patience is a virtue. BTW BR, " Loose" refers to loose clothing, loose tie etc while to lose something is as in loss or lost. Some grammar 4 u :D

May 30 2013:
Time Traveller your aforementioned postulations are noted.

Further Time Traveller.............4 U some GRAMMAR as opposed to GRAMMER.............Suggest I'm up to speed with the word 'loose' and its various meanings, including 'loose women' and I also know the difference between the words 'loose' and 'loser'!

You have been a great help (I'm still LOVING that franchise comparison for starters!), and you've demonstrated quite a bit of mental agility. I can promise next time around if you ignore 'Blade Runner' there are more stimulating conversations to be had with people who would be anything other than the LAST sort of person who we have any interest in or need to convince. :)

Once I've gotten a few other posts in a better format I'll be sure to let you know. There are lots of good bits that are completely buried in this thread, and it's a lot easier if it's all easily referred back to!

May 23 2013:
Ruminating over pieces of the puzzle here, I would like to offer my thoughts, which I will put together via a linear thought process in a question answer style. Some may hit & I expect others will miss their mark, as I don't know the whole big picture!

Q:What is a Co-opernation?
A:It fundamentally is a business system, it has to be to sustain itself and it's inhabitants.
Q:What does it do, how does it create its money?
A: It provides ecologically sustainable goods and services.
Q:Other companies are doing that already, what's the difference?
A: The Co-opernation is soley focused across the spectrum of its offerings to being ecologically sustainable and sharing profits after costs to its inhabitants (read shareholders).
Q: So what is The Vision/Mission of the Co-Opernation?
A: To create an ecologically sustainable planet that balances the needs of people, other life on Earth and the environment.
Q:How do you plan on growing this concept?
A:Initially direct to first world occupants, as the infrastructure for aquisition and distribution of required goods, services and people are well established.
Q:Can you be more specific and say what you do to grow/start?
A:If it is ecologically sustainable, then the Co-opernation can source and provide it. Eg: Hybrid cars, solar panels, green cleaning, led lighting, most efficient washing machines, televisions, refrigerators, lead free/organic paint, organic/chemical free fabrics/bed linen,towels,manchester, all not tested on animals products, lpg gas car conversions and supply, aquaculture products, permeculture products, educational services, plantation timber products, recycling centre and manufacturer of recycled materials, Fair trade sourced supplier for imports.........and soooo much more!
Q:Some of those things aren't that ecologically friendly, explain that?
A:This is a starting point that sets the bar higher, as things progress improvements can be made, ideally we would create them & sell to the world.

May 23 2013:
Blade Runner, I am not too sure about your motives. I have in fact taken the time to read your other posts after your response to one of my other posts. From my readings, I could easily see that your posts, (suprise, suprise) were rather confontational and antagonistic. Your response now is with respect to my input, rather infantile. To be honest, I wasn't even bothered to warrent your earlier response with a reply as you missed the whole point of my response. Oh yes I can just see you jumping up on your high horse now to combat me with this or that. The truth is, what you got amounts to diddly squat. You told me that I was a talker and doers do stuff while talkers are talking but when I directly asked you to tell exactly what you would do you had NOTHING. Now when I post something that is practical and realistic with well thought out and planned from my own knowledge and personal experience gleaned from 48 years on this planet with 12 words that are, well, words fail me. Essentially , though it comes down to 7 words, "You will be contributing what or not".
I think I have in essence, covered the entire spectrum of the posts here and will in fact be the guiding way forward for this whole concept. Denigrators like you are miffed that it wasn't them & so try to bring themselves up by denigrating others. I think people like you highlight what we are trying to distance ourselves from. You are quick to denigrate but provide NO ALTERNATIVE SOLUTION. You try to bring yourself up by trying tp bring others down. You know what, the numbers will play out what is the way forward. My advice is to reign yourself in a little, because believe it or not your opinions and thoughts are valid. You are in the minority with respect to people who put up posts and as such are hugely reflective of minorities... yes I have met plenty of people like you, though if you are more diplomatic you will not PISS OFF so many people! I do get you but just give credit where credit is due! :D

May 24 2013:
LOL
Ah Time Traveller ..........I have traveled through time on this planet for some time longer than yourself and have done a bit of gleaning and experiencing myself.............but I digress so let me refocus............

Motives you speak of..............I'm a creature of curiosity and endless questions and have found from experience that people dislike questions and believe their opinions, statements are beyond questioning. Alas for them I beg to differ.

And I further suggest many an insecure and person of self importance has deemed my questions as being confrontational and antagonistic, some have even deemed them as arrogant and bleated ala 'how dare you question what I say.' or even fawn outrage ala 'well words fail me.'

Suggest what you see as confrontational is me confronting the situation and taking the bull by the horns and cutting through the shmaltz and getting to the crux of the matter.

Suggest actions speak louder than reams of words or talk fests.

Oh and btw I don't recall you ' directly asking me to tell exactly what I would do' about anything in this conversation so kindly point me to where you uttered such so I can rectify my remiss.

As for the rest of your post which in my opinion is a sad piece of self noting, self serving dribble full of cheap attempts at denigration and you have the cheek to accuse me of denigration for asking short direct to the point questions.

Give us a break!

Cheers................

ps. Ever considered that some times there may not be an alternative solution to every problem..................can you perchance raise the dead?

May 23 2013:
Yeah, maybe you're looking for something that we've specifically said we're not trying to do over the next month or so, Mr. Runner. Time Traveller was part of the discussion and we've been walking through pieces, his evaluation process has already helped us come up with a few better angles. I'm not sure of the purpose of this specific content, but it doesn't look like you're trying to be helpful

I did ask you a couple of specific questions in another part of the thread, if you'd like to contribute that'd be a good place to answer!

May 26 2013:
Well William I'm the Guy that continually keeps reminding folk that the camel was designed by a committee and the Porsche was designed by one person.

Sure Time Traveler was part of the discussion and so could anyone else be, as you put your question out to the world.

As for 'helpful'.........suggest that when (correct me if I have misread your plan/hopes) you come on here looking for suggestions/help to launch a business concept/idea and somebody starts waffling/rambling on about the history/concepts of Socialism/Communism akin to a academia lecture its time for Elvis to leave the building.

Suggest you should be getting feed back/advice from folk that have started or are running businesses.

Suggest well wishers and ego massagers are worth dime a dozen and sometimes cloud the hard reality of what is required ................. but hey many an idea has been launched on a wing and a prayer. :)

Hope you Guys can sort the straw from the chaff!

Oh and btw yes you Guys did ask the world a couple of specific questions but I still await Time Traveler to show me, my remiss with him.

May 27 2013:
I'm not sure which you think is the better product when comparing the Camel to the Porsche. The camel has vastly superior design and spectacular self-repair and self-maintenance abilities, and a built in factory as a bonus. They are however poorly designed for city and freeway use, where the Porsche has a significant edge, a Porsche is much easier to store for long periods and can instantly hibernate, and while it has no self-repair capabilities it has a tiny fraction the number of moving parts... and so on.

We're focused on actual design, not ideology. If you use the scientific method to drive decisions in a corporation of the scale we're discussing then socialism and communism both have both historical comparisons of success and failure (and are different enough you shouldn't merge them like that). Science is supposed to be focused on enhancing our understanding, what parts work well, what parts do not? What lateral examples are often missed?

The focus on starting/running a business reflects a mis-communication on my part, because that's not a line of reasoning we should be getting hung up on, we have plenty of examples of existing businesses that overlap in plenty of ways. This wasn't a start-up attempt, this was an attempt to figure out how to communicate should become obvious if I do so properly.

Time Traveller, meanwhile, has gone further with the core concept, despite me starting from the wrong direction in this thread.

May 27 2013:
In my reply 5 days ago, in the 6 lines I wrote, I asked four times,starting with: "Ok...what you got?....doing what exactly?....back it up with substance.....walk the talk" !!!!!!!!!! Questions relate to the relevance of their context and as such are moot when misaligned ( re Ford, Gates comparison). As I didn't start this post and I didn't know exactly what the parameters where, I was feeling/teasing out the knowledge I needed to post the suggested Q & A post as a way forward. Thankyou BTW Jacqeline for your post commenting on it, I very much appreciated what you had to say. Mr Runner's initial response to it, asking if I was contributing or not, was not what I'd expected and even though he has said he isn't confrontational etc, to me was not a very constructive response and detracted from it's message and sidetracked us. In the history of man, there have always been the naysayers, most people once thought the world flat and vehemently would denounce anyone who thought otherwise! Oh and just to be clear in case I hadn't, Mr Runner.... What are you going to do? Exactly? BTW miming it in this context clearly won't work, you will have to TALK about it!

May 28 2013:
Well Time Traveller................in summary and as I'm shortly leaving the building (as opposed to taking my bat and going off for a sulk :] )...................

Suggest you imagine me as the Guy sitting at the board table listening to all the hype put forward by the enthusiastic grasshoppers vying their ideas for accolades.........

I'm the 'pain in the butt' Guy who then asks for the specifics thereto that then brings the concept back to the realms of reality/capability/functionality.

Some would deem that as naysaying or pissing on peoples parades!

I call it a reality check!

And if hey if you interpret confronting things as being confrontational, it I suggest begs the question of what if anything is wrong with confronting a situation/issue/problem.

Suggest you look around you and see the results of the masses not confronting the reality of the situations facing them.

Q.What am I going to do?

A. Keep asking questions/questioning any points other folk raise in this discussion forum that I believe need to be questioned.

Suggest not being able to put a 'magical bullet/solution' on the table does not disallow anyone questioning what others have put on the table and trying to stigmatize/denigrate people/peoples opinions with labels like 'naysayer or Silly Blade Runner man' is counterproductive to any discussion/debate.

Further, suggest asking short direct questions to long rambling dialogue is TALKING about the topic/concept!

"You can argue interpretations......................
But you cant argue the facts......................."

Why would we want a Porsche, when a camel is a vastly superior feat of engineering? I mean, we haven't defined a problem but the Camel's statistically a more likely solution.

We're not following in Steve Jobs' footsteps here, though that's one of many giants who's shoulders we plan on standing on. This is a response to a problem that's pretty obvious in retrospect, you just have to think a little laterally and remove any petty ideology or blinding context you have to get there, but those are far from impossible to do with a minor application of intellect.

While I admitted that I realized partway through that I was hitting this from the wrong direction (and stated in the post you replied to!) we have had some luck here, I would not have come up with the franchise parallel (which makes many parts easy to understand as a starting point) without Mr. Traveller's help for example, and he helped give me another useful angle in another way., Meanwhile It took Fritzie and Jacqueline to get it to click with me that pretty much everybody is going to need a couple of angles on this (self more than anyone!) and I neglected the most important one.

And the very process of conversation made me aware that I not only was missing a personality type that we very much needed for this but that I forgot an important element of psychology and tuned my message away from that sort of person to boot!

So yes, very useful, and who knows, if it clicks that in your Porsche and camel analogy, we're going several steps further, taking proven useful elements in each and a number of other things that are actually pretty obvious in retrospect (the advantage of lateral hops and breaking context, lots of 'duh' moments), realizing we might not have it JUST right and so we're putting the proven scientific method on top of THAT just in case. . . then we've both learned another good thing!

May 23 2013:
Okay, so yeah, that's definitely a tighter view of that part of the seed there. Thanks!

So, does the problem that we've just created kind of make itself really apparent? There's a serious tipping point there, isn't there? Once you can offer sustainability, and can remove any barrier to grow and spread you've kind of got a moral obligation to at least try to give everybody in the world the option right?

And with the world being what it is, even though we're talking about America's legal framework, we can pull a good bit of it off without actually impacting the rest of America at all, we just need enough for a real voting block, Citizen's United, and a purpose. When we can offer up a better-than-most-Americans lifestyle to the entire second and third world populations what happens?

I think a LOT of people know this, which is why there's so many utopian type projects that are focused on ecological and economic sustainability. I also think from a technology/capability standpoint Mondragon and some of the other big worker cooperatives may already be there, and many existing large corporations have the capacity to do the same and just aren't.

We're really just using some massive inefficiencies in the existing framework to support the same sort of thing. It's kind of like using cheat codes. Everybody else has already figured out how to get there the HARD way, we're trying to show everyone that the easy way is already there waiting to be exploited.

May 26 2013:
Well done, Time Traveller. This is superb. You have done a wonderful job of distilling key points from a sea of information.

Will & Amanda: with Time Traveller's permission, I think that this paragraph (or something very similar that follows its format) should be used to introduce and recruit others to your cause. It is the most concise, comprehensible, and effective post that I've seen on this thread that describes the essence of Co-operNation. This is a perfect example of a clear and brief introduction that we've been discussing. It is easy to understand, to the point, self-contained in its description, and provides the appropriate information without overwhelming the reader or losing the audience's attention due to being too lengthy or chaotic.

P.S. I'm sorry it's taken me a few days to get back to you (still drafting an email). I think Time Traveller has given you a GREAT starting point to organize and communicate your ideas around, so if you choose to do so, I'm sure you will be able to follow this example and start building outward from there. :)

May 27 2013:
Oh, this has been very, very useful! I ended up having to bring a lot of the psychology back to the forefront and in doing so realized that I'd come at this whole thing from completely the wrong direction.

I started with the tool without a good explanation of what it's long term purpose was, which not only was less helpful when it came to getting the right parts of the brain firing but also is overspecific to the point of nearing the sort of top-down management design decisions that we know works poorly in the long run.

So yeah, it was totally the wrong place to even start this conversation, though we still got a lot of other good things out of it (including the franchise parallel! That one's a lock!). I had to stumble a bit to figure out the best starting point.

May 27 2013:
That is good to hear. TED Conversations has different uses to different people, but the one I personally find most interesting is cases like yours in which someone comes for help thinking about an idea and others ask questions and give feedback that help the person develop his project further.

Even if people do not understand your project or idea well, for whatever reason, if you got some help, that is what you came for, so it has served your purpose.

Originally it seemed you were looking for actual collaborators in your idea, which is, I think, why people may have been pushing you to show your hand a little more than you have wanted to or been able to.

Oh no, don't let me imply that I was more clever than I was. We really weren't sure where to go next because there was some uncharted territory there. I was really focused on a solid framework but there may have been some pride in there and that's always to be avoided. What we asked for and what we needed were different things, and learning is awesome.

Definitely led to a good rethink when it comes to targeting a message!

May 27 2013:
Aren't they already building a zero-carbon-footprint, ecologically sustainable, 100% green, non-polluting, renewable energy City in either Dubai or Qatar? One of those Persian Gulf states is already doing this.

They have more money than God & the Devil & the Catholic Church combined! So I salute whichever Arab Persian Gulf state is doing this!! Is this conversation part of that same project?

May 6 2013:
Fabulous contribution. I want to introduce you to Art of Hosting. One of the ideas behind it is that the solutions for today's world will come out of meaningful conversations in a participative leadership sort of way; not from experts sitting in an office. I know there is a core group of individuals in Madison who have been trained in these methods. You may be familiar with World Cafe' or Circle practice. These are two of the more well know methods we use. Feel free to contact me and I can connect you with folks in Madison or I may need to visit my alma mater! Here is the website for you to explore: http://www.artofhosting.org/home/ and mine:http://www.influencinghealthcare.com/Influencing_Healthcare/Welcome.html
Rock on!

May 6 2013:
A very similar framework is common in inquiry-based classrooms. Specifically, the teacher hosts the class as a discourse community rather than "talking at" students. Teachers trained in inquiry-based teaching are also trained in how to use discourse among students as a key component in sense-making. It is a very student-powered way of working.

I am intrigued by your proposal and would be glad to advise if I'm able. I'm interested in learning more of the specifics (your posts below have helped a bit - thank you), and also perhaps seeing a "business model" of sorts that very explicitly outlines specific goals, structure, and other logistical/organizational things like that.

Some potential obstacles I've identified are the matter of how to initially fund this project before the autonomous infrastructure is fully operational, how to identify and recruit the optimal demographic to your cause, and how to avoid making the same mistakes that many other utopian communities have faced.

If you intend to seek outside funding, nailing down a cohesive business model and organizing your ideas more explicitly is a must.

Finding the right untapped demographic and recruiting them with success and efficiency will likely pose some challenges, but if you are able to establish a profile of the sort of person you're looking to recruit, that may help. One thing to consider is how to sufficiently incentivize your cause such that people are willing to join it and contribute enough to sustain the campuses. Take your example of Joss Wheden. I can't speak for everyone, but I believe that many individuals who were already independently wealthy would feel like they were giving up certain controls and freedoms that they were already able to afford themselves on their own if they joined in the manner you proposed.

Many utopian communities are constructed under ideal conditions which don't take fundamental constraints like human nature into account. They sound amazing on paper, but are not sustainable in practice.

If you need clarification on anything, or wish to discuss this further with me, please let me know. I'd also like to recommend an excellent book that outlines and discusses similar social/professional organization - "The Diamond Age" by Neil Stephenson.

May 4 2013:
Downloading 'Diamond Age' as we speak! I love Mr. Stephenson and we were preparing to hit up Heiroglyph after TED. :)

A couple of quick bits while I wait to read and find some ibuprofen.

You've hit on three obstacles that (logically) come up a lot (with a couple of others and in combination). I think I can say with confidence that the crew's done a REALLY good job twisting the second obstacle over and handling the demographic issue, as the whole idea is to use the actual science of human motivation (and other things) to get a lot out of people who may be considered average or even misfits, and to make itself obvious to those it'd appeal to. I like to think it'd lure in a lot of the best of the best as well, but average folks would do JUST fine.

The third concern is kind of fed by the second, in fact the Utopians were one of the groups of 'giants who hate each other', since I ran into a lot of pathological dislike of corporations, when I'm pretty sure the true source of their scorn was selfish motive for profit (which we avoid using the same strategies Valve/Mondragon and others use). I really do agree with the others in the group that this is a weirdly different design and that gives it a lot of potential, it's designed not to retreat but to expand and (once we've gotten to that second level of self sufficiency) to basically 'hire' anybody who has the same basic principles or even wants to support the cause. It may be that this really wasn't feasible legally until the dreaded Citizens United, though I think there were a few historical chances and this is just a 'spike'.

The first issue is the one that is the most challenging, we have a couple of ideas (mostly taking advantage of high cost private-public partnerships) but would prefer to inspire somebody with a lot of money who'd like to dive in feet first (as I would if I had lots of money), because then we can skip a few steps (cheat codes). :)

May 4 2013:
A couple more quick bits, more detail later when I've had a bit of rest. :)

Totally right on Joss Wheden specifically, I used him as a known example.

To be honest, you see how much energy and joy comes out of smaller group projects like SuddenDeathTheMovie (the musical) and groups like Roosterteeth and you see a lot of potential for us to pull a lot of our entertainment closer to home (within our monkeyspheres even! http://www.cracked.com/article_14990_what-monkeysphere.html ). I used Wheden as a known example, but there are plenty of amazingly talented unknown people, and many of the possible economic experiments are designed to allow people to entertain local people in more specific ways (say . . . making comic strips of the adventures of gaming groups, setting up touchscreen projector walls, serving amazing pizza at the local buffet for lunch, etc.) rather than work typical one-job-40-hour-week lives.

So, consider Utopians noble advisors for us, but we're looking to exploit the inefficiency of the current corporate/social/government infrastructure and create something fast, agile, and pervasive. We can't make a difference hiding away in exclusive communities the way we can being awesome and happy to the world while living in tiny little economic footprints and being gentle and kind by nature and training. . . and if we can do that and offer to 'hire' people into a world where they're constantly challenged and treated like adults? Well, a brain's a brain, right? Everybody in the world should have a chance to join something like us or something better. :)

May 9 2013:
Finally read Diamond Age, thanks for the recommendation, not sure how I missed that one!

And in answer to the implied question . . .Yes, this could be seen as a quick and dirty path into Phyles that could be implemented in a matter of months and years. They 'fit' in here.

However, we can do a lot better than that! We have a lot of context in society and many of our inventions and ideas are ways to deal with the mad world we live in. There's no sensible or ethical reason for people to be hurting other people, but it's happening in this world now and that limits our ability to see a better future.

We start freeing people FROM that context however, and they can start giving us some better visions and lead us somewhere better than our current excessively pessimistic science fiction.

May 10 2013:
I hope you enjoyed The Diamond Age and were able to glean some useful ideas from it.

I can appreciate the idea of wanting to eliminate the negative outlook that many individuals share about the future, but it's important to remember that sometimes, dire situations or adversity spawn innovation. Removing the context in its entirety might facilitate an atmosphere of complacency, which would undermine the cause.

The focus is always on actual outcomes, what really happens rather than what we want to happen, so there's little danger of complacency, but well observed.

I do very passionately believe that simply growing up in the societies we live in tweaks us tremendously, we make excuses for things and treat them as acceptable when they simply should not be, and that's a key to any peaceful society. If you want to eliminate rape than it has to be as shocking as it's supposed to be, because there's no excuse or justification for it.

And because we have to WORRY about all these excuses from our distant past we have to prepare for things that a more peaceful society wouldn't have to worry about.

Oh, and yes, there are plenty of peaceful societies, and there have been many more. (http://peacefulsocieties.org), and we can use actual science to make BETTER ones, think of them as the low bar.

I said earlier that in my head it's always been the "self replicating village" and I think that self-replication is key to making this come true. It doesn't have to make everything it needs to replicate but the more stuff that can be made by the company/village to fund another company/village the better it is, and there's sure to be some kind of threshold where you get a snowball effect.
OpenSourceEcology is getting on their way to creating a blueprint for a global village construction set the ideas and methods they use can be replicated to fit a Co-opernation.
Talk: http://www.ted.com/talks/marcin_jakubowski.html
Website: http://opensourceecology.org/

And...Yeah... that will do the trick... Honestly I'm quite sure that I forgot to say something that i find important but I can't remember what it is...

*remembered 15 minutes later*
DEMOCRACY!!! This is perhaps the biggest issue to solve. "who's going to run it?" You'll need a better model of democracy then the ones being used in countries today, to prevent corruption and most things bad.
Now I suggest using some kind of E2d model (Electronic Direct Democracy)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E2D_Internationalhttp://e2d-international.org/

Oh, and I would crowdfund this in stages, example:
1. Get $1-5000 to start a project on Topcoder, to build a website with nice illustrations and a concept idea.
2. Get another $1-5000 to use on OpenArchitectureNetwork, getting loads of designs for different buildings for all kinds of purposes (and a price-tag on the building you want)
3. Get the money
4. Do the project ;-)

I'd realized as part of this process that I'd missed one really important key point, I'd started from completely the wrong direction! It's kind of funny because initially we were going to start a small business too, but we humbly realized that trying to demonstrate a nothing-to-everything path wasn't just daunting, but it was painfully restricting the future options!

Our next stop is Hieroglyph (there was some debate whether this was a 'Big Idea' or a 'Moonshot Ecosystem' approach), since the forum structure's a bit friendlier and it gives a fresh start that's ore focused no the problem than the solution!

And yes, you could look at this as bootstrapping a self-replicating economically friendly village as a franchise. . . but with the scientific method on top of all of them and with each village as a potentially slightly different evolutionary experiment. . . and with the abusive power of the multinational corporation twisted into a power for the force of good. :)

I'll mention it in response to the top-post, but here's the Hieroglyph starting point!

May 21 2013:
I have a feeling, perhaps incorrect, that what you envision is not hard to understand at all or even unfamiliar as a model but that you are not realizing which parts are hard to understand and which not. So you may be over-explaining the easy parts, at the expense of your carpal tunnel.

Is this the idea? You envision a business in which the people treat each other well and in which the products/services on offer will be determined collaboratively, arising from the inventiveness of the participants. Rules for collective living and working will also be either collaboratively or democratically determined. Whatever you develop will be available to members of the collective for free but sold to outsiders in such a way that the surplus returns over costs from outside sales will finance the resources used to provide services/goods at no charge inside. This latter condition would not be in place from the get-go, but the business would rely on kickstarter-type funding to get off the ground.

Your expectation is that the participants, who would not earn income but all of whose needs would be met through internal production would be so inventive and productive that the surplus from sales would ultimately be adequate not just to finance the resources needed to provide fully for the members but also to start buying up ecosystems and so forth.

The only slight difference is I'm aware 'no money' sounds scary to some, so I prefer to just leave things open to economic experiments within, just so all the basics and most of the perks are free. In the end we'll end up in the same place or somewhere better.

You hit on one of the better revelations that came from this thread, that we need to spend a bit more time on the already solid hybridized Worker Cooperative/Valve concept before moving forward.

A lot of the other aspects exist because we had a different intent by design. We wanted an engine that could be used to bring things like the Venus Project and Neal Stephenson's Tall Tower into fruition. We wanted to create something anybody in the world could be invited to join, as long as they're not going to ruin anybody else's fun.

Almost everything we've got is really just a few small steps from your summary though, in fact some of the pieces kind of assembled themselves. It just happens a few small steps can unlock a LOT of potential that's clearly being untapped. After all, we still do have wars and unemployment and are clearly NOT sustainable, and I'm seeing CEOs getting paid as much as dozens of nurses, when most CEOs aren't providing as much value as ONE.

So, the world being what it is, clearly there's a void to be filled, true? :)

And there's certainly energy to fill it! I was in Madison during the whole Occupy/FitzWalkerstan adventure, I'm darn creative, but I can't begin to imagine what we're really capable of if we just tapped a fraction of that potential.

May 21 2013:
I actually think being simple and clear about what you propose does not seem at all threatening to anyone or anything. It is portraying the project kind of vaguely but as a radical departure that might make it seem threatening. Though I still don't see why anyone would consider it scary. The business will either be self-sustaining or not.

The reason I think not charging for things within the organization is not scary is that it is actually the norm. Even in economic theory, the very reason for organizations/firms is that it is inefficient for everyone to be working solo always contracting with everyone else at every moment when a project requires a team. Organizations are exactly groups of people among whom there are what are sometimes called "implicit contracts" as to obligations/expectations as part of the productive ensemble.

So the idea of people doing things for each other within an organization with no money changing hands among them is absolutely familiar and status quo.

Even a big company like a Microsoft will often provide transportation services to employees, have refrigerators of free food and beverages, have on-site recreation, and so on.

What is different is that employees are compensated and can, as a result, pay for the things they need or want that are not provided in house, which includes most of what they consume. Obviously there are models in which housing and education for kids is also part of the business arrangement. Housing and recreation are part of some big economic complexes in Asia, I know. In-house education was commonplace on the Isreali kibbutz.

May 21 2013:
Oh, if we were stopping there, then we could probably pull this off without being disruptive.

But we're most definitely not. As I mentioned, a couple of steps created a whole bunch of problems, and when you combine breaking regional dependence, internal sustainability, and a desire to hire anybody who wants to play. . . we see a few things to watch out for.

What happens if we end up hiring a substantial chunk of people in a local economy? Our people aren't contributing and we're going to be difficult to tax, how do we keep from creating ghost towns? What happens if pharmaceutical companies try to prevent us from making our own medicines? How much can we abuse the prototype loophole, and how much will we have to influence local laws so that patent laws don't apply to our non-market? How will people react when we start giving away ideas (open patented) that are better than what some companies use to profit? What about when we offer to hire every Saudi woman who wants equal rights? Or every Israeli or Palestinian that would rather join us that be trapped in a cycle where blood in the soil is just covered by the bodies of innocents?

We have some huge efficiency advantages, which gives us solutions (defensive rings of patents can be used offensively too for example!), but some problems are tied to capitalism, and while there's not much redeeming there, we don't want to make a mess of things.

Capitalism depends on things that we will undermine by existing, for example we want to hire all the unemployed that want to join, since we're about getting the most out of everyone. . . but even that can be absolutely devastating to the system as it is. It requires quite a bit of unemployment

This is also part of why I'm keen on healthcare and education especially. It's a missionary trick, but hoooo-boy does it work well!

I suppose that does make us ambitious, but I see it more as 'scaleable'. :)

May 21 2013:
Oh, and I ran out of letters, but have to add I DO like the path from 'regular business adding more good things internally' and just treating it as if it were driven by employees rather than management. I'll make sure that's not forgotten, because so many of us may have familiarity with different sorts of corporate office but not have any knowledge of worker cooperatives or much of a natural way to see growing from a university.

May 8 2013:
Strangely enough, Communism started out with a similar set of ideas. I don't mean Communism as practiced in Russia under Joseph Stalin. He was a totalitarian dictator. Historians tell us that Stalin killed even more people than Adolph Hitler. And Hitler is the epitome of ultimate evil in my book. I don't mean Mao Tse Dong either. He was a Communist. But he also had a set of totalitarian and dictatorial issues. And ultimately the broad history of the human species might place him alongside Stalin (and Hitler? I'll leave that one to the historians.)

No, I'm talking about the brand of Communism that existed in the 1920's and 1930's in places like the U.S.A. Ronald Reagan was a Communist during this period. Yes, he was. Read his biography. Before he became Governor of California, before he became President of the U.S.A., Ronald Wilson Reagan was a card carrying member of the Communist Party. Back then it was all about collective socialism more than what we now call Communism. And when you look at how China is evolving today (w/a Communist Committee form of government still in place) it should give pause for thought and reflection. Reminds me a whole lot of what you propose here. You need to research the social experimentation that went on back in the 19th and early 20 centuries. Many of those experiments did NOT work. Some did. Some still exist in one form or another. Don't reinvent the wheel, go back to your history. History tends to always be instructive. JV

Communism is a good response, and it's full of amazing ideas. We do have the lucky advantage of accidentally addressing what I feel is the greatest disadvantage of Communism though.

With co-opernations, the governments are inside the corporations, it doesn't have to appeal to EVERYONE. We don't have to hire jerks and they don't get to influence how we operate, so we're not forced to jump through nearly as many hoops as a government is to solve problems. Turns out that changes a LOT.

May 9 2013:
I don't know where you'd go to find the documentation of this. But the key human behavior element in voting is choice. That is, having a choice in something is a valued form of autonomy. Social Psychologist have done a lot of recent research on this issue and others like sharing and giving and fairness. In doing so, they've found scientific validation for many of the teaching of Jesus and Gandhi. This research can/will also do a lot to preserve motivation and commitment within the social structure you hope to create. Also, there are some Maoist ideas in there.

For my generation, Communism meant murderous dictators, potential nuclear annihilation, and the cold war with proxy-conflicts like Vietnam. But academic professors of Sociology now see Karl Marx as one of the foundation thinkers in that discipline. Marx is to Sociology as Freud is to Psychoanalysis or B.F. Skinner is to Experimental Psychology. Economics Professors respect Marx as well.

My suggestion for you is to proceed carefully. Usually communities such as you propose tend to be founded by charismatic leaders. And it is the charisma that sustains the unity of the community. But that places you at risk for David Koresh. Also, in any new social structure, you risk attracting an entire raft of the marginalized who live at the fringes of modern society. I don't think that is what you want either. You might accidentally recruit criminals or the severely mentally ill.

Better, write a book. Research the book. Site and footnote the book. If you need to. go get help with the book. And then publish it. Enroll in graduate school. This idea could be your dissertation in say Political Science. Then you can publish it to the New York Times best sellers list. JV

May 9 2013:
Oh yes, we saw some of the more dangerous aspects of it right away.

But that was. . . almost a year ago now. It's not the ONLY idea that can use the same fundamentals, but it's powerful and gentle, capable of saving entire ecosystems and incapable of war or deceit. We've got dozens of TED talks in there. Most of them fit, really.

Citizen's United gave us a few ideas, to be fair. What if we pretend the bad guys are right, that corporations ARE people? Can we make one that's not a mean spirited dillweed?

And the answer is. . . of course! Every one of these tools and constructs are our own, and we shouldn't settle for this one specific one that evolved into this mindless mess.

So I guess in your context, we made the co-opernation into our charismatic leader, and our examples within Exemplars, people like Kaylee from Firefly and all those others who we'd love to be and who nobody would think ill of. And with them we have the same sort of collective mind hack that people keep doing stupid, horrible things with (let's emulate jerks!), except the opposite.

May 8 2013:
More bits & pieces from the past year --
-----------------------

It is not okay that we live in a world where people think it's okay to hurt other people.

I bet you just read that sentence and nothing clicked, just like it was with me for years. Yet that thought, that simple realization invariably brought tears to Rebecca's eyes, ended her ability to carry on a conversation, and depressed her immensely.

So I'm going to try again.

We can harness the power of the atom, we've unraveled our own DNA, we can make cats glow in the dark and practically can see the origins of the universe, and we still can't figure out how to stop murdering each other.

Because. . .what? Those great big brains that ENABLE us to connect so easily and to harm each other so easy are too dumb to figure out how to stop constantly motivating ourselves to be awful people? Who's buying this? That's not even a plausible science fiction scenario! We know it happened, and we know it's because of centuries of gradually adding more and more of these societal constructs and then spend most of our lives unlearning those great lessons we learned in Kindergarden in order to survive in them. And that's kind of silly, isn't it?

So I and a few friends took it seriously, and cobbled together a way for us to kick over the chessboard and stop ruining each other's lives all the time. It was actually pretty easy, you just had to look in the wrong places (if there's one of Rebecca's lessons that I alawys took seriously, it was 'Just because that's why they made it doesn't mean that's what it's for')

And that idea (VERY ROUGHLY) is to use the legal shell of a multinational mega-corporation to create parts of the world where we are constantly challenging ourselves to be better people and everybody within them is there because they adhere to a more reasonable standard of morality at a very minimum (be nice to other people, embrace the idea that EVERY human is fundamentally capable of being wonderful, etc.).

May 8 2013:
Here are some bits & pieces from various attempts to summarize --
----------------------

The Co-opernation

I'm sure you've heard of Valve, and they do make a great starting point, so we'll start there, since they have a few bits already incorporated and make a good proof of concept (and Cory Doctorow wants to work somewhere like there, so that's pretty cool, right?). There are other examples, like Mondragon and others that use some similar approaches. And they're generally pretty successful. Let's hit on a couple of key factors that they use, and we need.

1) Very flat salaries
2) Self-organizing management structures (you pick your teams/squads, pick people to lead you if you need leaders, and fun people aren't taken away all the time against everyone's will)
3) The employees as a whole democratically influence how resources are used in the company
4) Projects are chosen based on what interests you and what you feel should be done

How do you win at a game if you can avoid wasting resources on war and rarely have to worry about money?

By getting so far ahead in the technology curve that you look like you came from the future and they look like monkeys with sticks.

Everything else revolves around that. You expand your manufacturing base to build more universities and research ships. You expand your population to get more researchers or engineers. But all of that is secondary to getting more researchers.

And science says that happier people are far more productive, and having fun makes people happy.

So most people are spending their time discovering cool new things to share with everyone or implementing plans to make people happy and have fun.

The only effective competition would require out-researching and producing us, which would require increasing the happiness of their own citizens.

May 7 2013:
Yes, I'm interested in what you're working to achieve and have some of the requisite skills who have enquired about.
In particular, Presentation Design, Copywriting, Nomenclature, etc. Where can I get more info?

May 6 2013:
Hi all -- I'm one of the folks who's been working with Will on these ideas. See all his comments below for more details than were possible in the original post! Thanks, and we appreciate all your comments, questions, and suggestions!

May 3 2013:
I think you will find numerous people happy to give you feedback if you explain what you are proposing. I am confused about how corporate campuses fit in and what you propose to hire people to do.

Are you proposing something like Scott mentioned- the communes of the sixties in which groups of people bought a piece of land and lived on it, each taking on roles that allowed the community to be sustainable? Or residential colonies and utopian communities that have been founded throughout history?

May 4 2013:
I believe I understand the parts that are here. I share with Jacqueline the interest in how you will attract the sort of population your model envisions. I think you would find an abundance of people quite willing to put themselves into the picture as people to be hired. I would expect you might draw upwards of ten times the number of willing participants who actually do not meet your profile (but think they do, or would like to believe they do) as those who do meet your profile.

But I don't think attracting people would be a problem, as there is little risk to many people who would be interested in the proposition.

It's an idea with stages, but the final stage we've gotten to would be involve having one large multinational corporation that's open to anyone with a basic set of principles (don't hurt other people, respect other people, don't break anybody else's toys, mellow principles). They do have a bunch of external 'products' that they occasionally use to acquire resources (lots of healthcare, computer/software, and entertainment solutions at the very least). These products were designed/created/tested by the citizen/employees working in a multitude of more efficient (and happier/less stressed) ways. Science is used heavily and marketing is largely nonexistent (there's no freedom to deceive to get someone to buy/use a product within.

There are a number of corporate campuses that are better described as charter cities, and are fully functional vibrant places to live, be entertained, and work. They've long ago hit the point where they were largely self-sufficient (owning enough resources and means of production). Within there are a variety of sorts of housing and workspaces, all designed by the citizen/employees. People generally live smaller lives (within their 'monkeysphere', thank you Cracked) but are encouraged to have so much fun within theirs that they don't care that some funny looking person in some other country believes something weird.

The real key though are the people within who are living in a world that's actually designed for creative humans who would rather cooperate than compete, for whom Fox News (and to be fair most cable news) appears with a disclaimer that content is not actually news, and who happily help out without concern for 'residual value' or other sillinesses we deal with in our lives, because we're guessing they'll end up with a much better idea, and maybe a whole bunch of us will flock to theirs, but either way at this point the world is a whole lot kinder.

May 4 2013:
Wow! You are talking about nothing less than unraveling and then re-weaving the entire socio/economic fabric of Planet Earth! And, you plan to do it without fighting against anything (not even FOX News)? Reach sometimes exceeds grasp and this idea may be an example of that. I am far too small-minded to even begin to grasp the faintest glimmer of optimism about this plan succeeding. Sorry, the best I can offer is three candidates for the corporate name. 1) After surviving a capsized ship at sea folks scramble to find refuge and a chance for new life in a LIFEBOAT. 2) When the hot, dry desert has all but depleted every parched traveller new hope springs to life at first sight of the OASIS. 3) An Old Testament tradition allowed for a regular period of forgiveness of wrongdoing and a place of refuge for the weary, suffering fugitive. The time was called a JUBILEE. Sorry about the loss of your beloved. I hope you find purpose in pursuing her dream. All the best!

May 4 2013:
To be fair, it was NOT our intent to make something quite this. . . big. It's just when you've drawn 5/6 of a circle you might as well finish it and see how it looks too, right?

In this case our efforts to refine a logical expansion of a specific type of corporate model ended up solving a few more problems than we had expected to. It's mostly a framework and a methodology, with a lot of potential within. Most of the credit goes to those who gave so much power to multinational corporations. :)

It's really not that hard, we are fully capable of having few produce plenty for a swarm of people and have more manufactured crisis than I can count. People just don't say 'Oh, I have so little stress in my life and life is generally awesome, I must kill a hobo!'.

If people have better options than they tend to lean towards them and it's not difficult to be happy. People are capable of being altruistic, we're just in an economic system that punishes altruism. The trick is to put a system that REWARDS nice/altruistic behavior inside the one that already exists. :) It's more efficient (per science again) so other corporations won't be able to compete, and it won't have to play the same games.

Once we decided to explore the 'corporation as benevolent post-democratic nation' concept we really dove in elbows first, to quote Archer, it's like Babytown Frolics in here ;) It's a tool far, far more powerful than any of us would have invented, but if we tweak it to our own needs instead of going 'eeeewwww' then we can do some amazing things, we believe.

May 4 2013:
As you elaborate your proposal, do give some thought to those who join up who think of themselves as having the values and priorities you describe but who actually don't at all. Many people think they are all about love, respect, collaboration, empathy, lack of ego- they consistently describe themselves that way... but actually are not those things. It is only how they idealize themselves and not how they behave. What happens then?

May 4 2013:
Wise point, Fritzie. One thing that we tried to keep in mind is that people are who they are, we respond to our environments and we respond pretty stupidly in certain situations (okay, lots of them). A lot of the work we did was put into enabling the situations where people can behave in a more humane way (we have a lot of unfair and unnatural punishments to many altruistic behaviors in society, they take a bit to unlearn!).

We also are firm believers of exploiting our flaws as much of our advantages.

Now, there's no LOGICAL reason to want to shoot a dead tree, and we can point that out all we want, but come on, those people obviously had a blast there, right? So why not exploit that? What if we said that anybody who planted a certain amount of trees could shoot down a dead one with a minigun like that? And every and now and then had contests where whoever did the most amazing environmental things could get to play with a linux rifle and an automatic shotgun for a bit and take on some of the most vile dead trees?

I bet the least hippie person you expect plants a forest! ;)

On top of that, now we're turning dead tree hunting into a viable thing, which is way better than living creature hunting. . . it's hard not to like that, right?

I also must confess to having a personal stake in this particular idea. I love trees, but I LOVE me a good solid book too, with real paper pages that I can bend and fold and there's just something more satisfying about paper books, they KNOW they've been read, right? But I always feel strangely guilty now, because trees die for them. But reading books made from free range humanely hunted zombie trees? I can get behind that! :)

May 4 2013:
You are thinking the principles and policies would be decided in advance, then, rather than by the people who assembled? So they would hear about the policy of shooting of dead trees (as well as other policies) in advance and opt in or out of the community based on the rules of the place? Or would people be assembled on the basis of more general qualifications and then vote democratically about whether the community wants to reward people with the right to fire rifles at dead trees?

May 4 2013:
Well, I'm not sure there's a specific principle that would cover the hunting of dead trees :) That'd be more of an . . . ongoing project? An example of using people's real-world illogical desires to get a net-win (trees!) out of a situation that is generally a net-lose. Said dead-tree ranges wouldn't be anywhere near a community but in a controlled range of course.

Lots of otherwise awesome, productive, fun people like and want some crazy things, and as long as they're cleaning up afterwards and nobody's getting manipulated or hurt without consent we want to embrace that, but we also want to use our own natures to 'lure' us into gentler, more productive behaviors while still allowing everyone their occasional wacky extravagance. Meanwhile we're redirecting one segment of the 'need' crowd for firearms in a productive direction while providing something more fun than a Glock to play with.

The principles are/will be designed to discourage turning noses up at things people may find personally distasteful by training but are demonstrably harmless (or not harmful compared to it's replacement, etc.). In that particular case there are green and net-energy positive ways to allow someone to harmlessly wander off and slay a zombie tree on their free time without there being any reason to worry about social ostracism. They should be treated reasonably and allowed to explain themselves while on the work/campus environment.

That being said, another part of the design is to allow people to move about more freely and form squads and groups of people they work with well and stick with them rather than have them torn away (Valve does this already too) and we're just expanding it to those who choose to live on the city-campuses to other aspects of life. So if people just don't get along they can move on with whoever wants to join them, it's less socially damaging than the alternative.

One discovery is that by focusing on the solution rather than the problem we've created an unnecessarily narrow focus. The co-opernation was only intended to be a means to an end, and is designed to write itself out of existence as soon as possible to address a deeper concern.

The co-opernation is only a proof of the possible, and once we have a visionary that can see the problem we've exposed and understand the implications, and can communicate that well, then that proof either solves the problem (if we're unlucky) or it generates the kind of analysis that creates something that works even better and becomes immediately unrecognizable. :)

May 29 2013:
Once you move this along to a concrete proposition and are ready to share, would you please post it here again?

Many TEDsters might not have time to follow your Hieroglyph thread to see how your proposal takes shape there, but many would, I think, be very interested in seeing the meat of the proposal once you have it.

I mean, we'll definitely be posting a link to a consolidated resource once we have one, but we didn't get all the resources we needed to create that because I started from completely the wrong direction!

But there's no plausible way to begin to even communicate the problem the coopernation was designed to solve or why it's absolutely urgent we do so in 2000 characters, much less a tiny fraction of the subtleties in the design that only address issues when applied en masse. And that's before we have to deal with all these assumptions!

So first we get proper passionate visionary who grasps the core problem and can place the coopernation where it belongs, as one of many possible solutions to a very serious problem that was exposed in the creation process. This is a fundamentally bigger problem than most are addressing, and the existence of at least one solution is exciting enough that somebody else can generate the energy.

And who knows, maybe by then somebody will have figured out how to summarize it better. This is sadly not as easy as perhaps I made it seem at first.

May 23 2013:
Dear William,
I am very sorry about your loss, and what a wonderful idea to remember and move forward with something she inspired!

In my perception, fighting against something uses energy that we could use more productively. Fighting against something simply gives it energy to exist, and it appears that you have discovered that already....kudos to you!

In my perception and experience, it is more beneficial to move forward with new thoughts, feelings, ideas, beliefs and practices which might serve to change a paradigm. I believe people will be more likely to let go of old habits and practices when/if they can see something that might work better.

That being said, I think/feel you have a GREAT idea, and TED is certainly a good forum in which to spread your idea...carry on my friend:>)